The Line Before Malice
by AKAAkira
Summary: Ichirou Kodama is known around Maijima High as a mean teacher. Only one woman ever learned that he is thrice the cruel person, and she's dead.
1. Children

**Summary**: Ichirou Kodama is known around Maijima High as a mean teacher. Only one woman ever learned that he is thrice the cruel person, and she's dead.

Takes place before the events of TWGOK.

******Disclaimer: The World God Only Knows is owned by Tamiki Wakaki. I own absolutely nothing in relation to this work, except for the plot of this particular story.**

* * *

She only knew him because they were the only kids at their apartment complex.

As a result, despite the gender and three-year age differences, whenever their parents told them to "play outside" they always meant "play with each other". Both had objected, Kodama because she was weak, and she because Kodama was an ugly and selfish brute who used every advantage his physical superiority offered. When playing soccer, she was the forced goalkeeper dodging the boy's hardest kicks. At the playground, he would scramble to the top and laugh as her skirt got stuck. With tag, he lazily stayed just out of reach – running backwards – and taunted her as she struggled to close the distance.

"Little kids should know their place," he would sneer. "Didn't your mommy ever tell you to respect your elders?"

Mommy also happened to tell her that he was an idiot, so she just shut up and bore with it.

* * *

To her delight, his comeuppance came rather often.

The first time happened after the surely not too stupid venture of placing a four-year-old onto a bicycle and sending her down a hill. Admirably, she managed not to fall for the first dozen tries, but she was still a four-year-old, and the unavoidable crash ensued, resulting in badly scraped hands and a trip to the hospital.

The adults' opinions varied – his own parents, for example, refused to believe that their sweet child would set a little girl up for injury. The eventual consensus, however, was that as the elder he was ultimately responsible for looking after her. The verdict was no TV, no games, and chores galore.

"Little wench!" he had shouted at her, the next time they saw each other. "Look what you got me into!"

"Quiet, child," an elderly nurse had reprimanded. "Say no more, and we'll all leave happy."

"But she started it!"

In technicality, he had started everything, but she wasn't going to let a little thing like the truth interrupt the beautiful scolding Kodama received.

* * *

Kodama one day managed to learn that physical bullying granted him no favours, so he turned to the method the parents almost seemed to encourage: educational.

"Fifteen plus seven is twenty-two," he childishly said. "So what's nine plus thirteen?"

The five-year-old girl would struggle to answer. "Twenty?" she eventually tried, and Kodama had laughed his face off.

"No, idiot! It's still twenty-two! What's one plus five?"

Even she, not yet graduated preschool, could do this one. "Six!"

"Nope," he would answer, his grin smug. "Strawberry.*****"

She briefly considered stuffing his stupid strawberry down his stupid gullet, but then decided that that was a waste of a perfectly good fruit.

* * *

The showdown occurred on the cultural festival. It consisted of a science fair, a classroom, two stalls, fifty votes, and a blue ribbon.

It had all started with the pseudo-quizzes Kodama had given in her youth, which eventually turned into nothing short of an all-out war with education as the bullets. The adults found it endearing, and the other children found it annoying, but she took it as serious business, firing off several nuclear warheads' worth of facts and concepts to outdo him whenever she had the chance.

"Idiot girls should close their idiot mouths and look the idiot they are" was Kodama's most recent reply.

And so, it was _on_.

In the end, her exhibit surpassed Kodama's admittedly subpar showing. She even managed to snag third place in the overall contest. "I got a nice blue ribbon," she had bragged, proudly displaying her prize to her adversary. "All you got was a pat on the head and a few pitying looks."

Kodama's only response was to flick a bottle cap at her head.

* * *

She would not be caught dead giving him a lunchbox.

That was what she had promised herself when her parents apologetically asked this of her. Said promise had been pretty easy to uphold; Kodama never had friends, so she did not have to worry about people seeing them together once she reached him. Plus, the passage to the middle school was largely unfrequented, as one might expect on a day with a _yakisoba_ bread special. On the other hand, committing the act in itself made her nauseous. She wondered why she hadn't just chucked the box to begin with – and then decided that she hadn't reached that low.

_Yet_. Kodama made an art out of grinding others' nerves, and even if it was possible to have immunity to it, it hadn't been bestowed upon her.

He had flushed angrily when she handed him the _bentou_. "Little girls should stay at home and play dumb games," he had snarled. In his view, that was all children and women were good for: being dumb.

"Stupid boys should shut up and be grateful," she had retorted. In her view, Kodama was stupid because – well, he was stupid, period.

He gave no reply, instead turning his back on her and beginning to eat. That was it. No "Thank you". As if it had been obligation, not a favour.

No less than she expected from a self-centered brute. She, too, turned, and then left.

* * *

The picture made her smile, despite its contents. It had been a sight to behold.

She always had been small for her age, so the rather thick textbooks she cradled contrasted with her almost-elementary-school look. Contrarily, Kodama, almost a grown man even then, was stuck with _Engrish for Dummies_ in his hands, a paper-thin version at that. With the oddities put together in the same frame, in spite of the row they were having – it made her smile at the sight.

They had been bitterly clashing over the results of a test from the cram school they both attended – something about Japanese grammar structure, if she remembered right. Her father must have seen them, taken the picture, and developed it. Why he put it in the family photobook was beyond her, however.

Oh, and Kodama had lost that argument.

She reminisced that sometimes, Kodama acted like this didn't get to him. "Marks aren't everything," he had simpered, in the tone of one who thought he understood the world, when in fact he hadn't been given a good beating yet. "What really matters is application – and you can't measure that with tests! No one cares about your average!"

The missing pencils she would discover later contradicted this claim.

More often, his anger would boil over. "Know your place, brat," he would spit out, and then switch over to English, as if proving a point. "Little kid stupid is! I English better speak!"

She never did bother correcting this. She let the idiots be idiots; it was their only quality left, albeit not a redeeming one.

Amusedly, she shook her head and chuckled, one last time – and then tossed the picture into the garbage bin.

* * *

For the first time, she felt truly furious.

"You forgot." Her rage was barely contained in the words that caged them. "First, do you mind telling me in what definition of the word 'forget' does it involve telling me the _wrong date for the pre-entrance exams!?_"

"I'm a busy man," Kodama snidely replied. "Am I really supposed to babysit little girls? I have too much work to do!"

Technically, he was correct. He was a college student now, after all. But on the other hand, Kodama had said this in exactly the tone that suggested he was not going to bother with the very work he was using as an excuse.

No matter; it was too late to change anything now. With the exam done and over with, there was no way she was getting into her choice university anymore. She'd probably be stuck with the local, abysmal Maijima College that Kodama attended. Her chances at a flexible, opportunistic future had just contracted like shrink-wrap. All because of one stupid, stupid stunt.

She had no words to say. She just spun and marched off.

It was petty, she had told herself. It was just petty, childish, immature, juvenile – it was _petty_! But it was also what she should have expected of Kodama, since it was the only reason he didn't have an indictable offense on his criminal record. After all, he was just too _stupid_ to be truly malevolent – and unfortunately, stupidity was not yet a crime. Regardless of the consequences. And regardless of collateral damage.

And that was when she swore – she will never become as low as Ichirou Kodama.

* * *

**_(*) A Japanese word play. One is _****ichi_ and five is _go_; therefore, one plus five is _ichigo_, or strawberry._**


	2. Adults

_Konpa_, or a casual drinks gathering, was an interesting affair.

Derived probably from the word "company", it was directed towards the creation and maintenance of a social group. Considering that the post-secondary level was lathered with groups of one – like those split from previous friends who took other roads to the future, or the ones who had forsaken sociality and lived by the code of cram school – it was an especially nice chance to start anew. As it happened, a few seniors at Maijima College were dividing the freshmen amongst themselves, determined to not let a single straggler slip into solitude – which was more often than not a death sentence in a corporate society where connections got you everywhere.

So when a classmate she didn't even know was in her class told her she was invited, she felt like honestly thanking the man.

Two seconds later she wanted to strangle him when in the same breath he stated that Kodama was coming as well, so don't be shy, there'll be a familiar face!

In the end, she had ended up tagging along. It wasn't as bad as she expected, though there was that very awkward moment when Kodama had been placed beside her and they had given each other cold enough glares to chill the already iced drinks in their hands. Two of the seniors leading the meeting gave an encouraging, if somewhat unprofessional, speech, and then they all raised their glasses for a "_Kampai!_" before downing their respective alcohol.

Well, _damn_. This beer was good.

The night wore on, and the gathering turned to two groups chitchatting amongst themselves. It was to her displeasure that she learned females were supposed to help serve the drinks so that everyone always had a full cup. As the person to her right was disturbingly adept at refilling his cup as quickly as he drank it, to not seem rude to others she was forced to attend to the person on her left – Kodama.

She then turned this to her advantage by sneakily swapping the beer with an unhealthy mix of gin and vodka.

One particularly memorable moment was when Kodama jumped on top of his seat and started yodeling. The first-years howled with laughter while the seniors failed to hold in their snickers, and she just took the whole thing on video, her hand shaking so badly from her restrained mirth. This was such brilliant ridiculing material. _Nothing_ in her past eighteen years had netted her anything better than this. It was so perfect she almost felt like kissing him.

…Gods, she must be drunker than she thought.

* * *

For her, the world was ending, and the first sign was Kodama landing a job.

Well, he was only an intern – a student teacher, as per the terms for the partnership between Maijima College and Maijima High. She doubted Kodama would've qualified otherwise; even the first-year material looked far too advanced for Kodama, in her opinion.

She also felt a little bit bad for the high school – it was partly her fault, after all, that his English made ears bleed. There was good news and bad news to this – the good news being that he was easy to replace, and the bad news being that they would _definitely_ need to replace him.

That did not change the fact, however, that he was now getting paid, which irked her to no end.

He went to great pains to gloat about this. For example, he would bring her to a restaurant and make a show of getting the more expensive food and drinks. He would then eat it with gusto, optionally with sidelong comments about the quality of the ingredients. And when he finished, he would take a large gulp of alcohol and say, "I was going to say you have to treat your sempai, but you don't have the money, do you? Ah-hahaha!"

Wisely, she just remained silent and took it for what it was: free food.

* * *

It came as a very nasty slap to the face when the final grade for one of her courses came out lower than expected. By thirty percent, to be exact.

Her first reaction could be thoroughly described as the internet acronym WTF. The second reaction was to demand an answer from her professor.

"You're sharp," he had told her, "I can give you that. But have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror? You have that kind of face, even now. It's screaming, 'No matter what happens to me, I know someone who has it worse'. Humans always judge themselves relative to others. You're just more of an example than most. So really, what did you expect? You have low standards. You're too complacent."

It was with these words in mind that she found herself back in the bar, drink in hand and more depressed than when she usually was when watching Kodama spiraling down the road to passing out flat on the floor. She was trying to absorb the lecture as readily as she could with alcohol, but somehow they seemed so surreal – even without beer – that none of it could sink in.

"_I'm_ the one who's complacent?" she grumbled, giving a meaningful stare at Kodama for a professor who was never going to catch the gesture. Kodama, for his part, was trying to balance the cup on his forehead, laughing giddily while doing so.

She just shook her head, downed her own cup, and left quickly to dump the expense on Kodama.

The next week, her grade point average fell another ten percent.

* * *

She hadn't been around the lowest human in the world for this long without learning the required secondary powers that came with the status.

His selfishness was the best example. Kodama literally took everything for granted, and this at best granted her a quick laugh while Kodama was clueless, or at worst made her burn with shame for even _knowing_ the sorry excuse of a human. As a child, there was that _bentou_ he took from her without thanks; as an adult, there was that time in the library where someone had temporarily set coffee down on the table where Kodama was studying – and he had _taken_ it, and _sipped_ from it, without even bothering to look up. In fact, she was only able to tell it wasn't deliberate because his face remained that of a pug's, as it always was when he focused his utmost concentration on books.

She walked away while she had the chance. She rather doubted that any theft would be resolved on the account of a doglike expression, and not even a cute dog at that.

Then there were the kids – whenever he thought he could get away with it, he would march into a playground full of children, angrily shouting, much for the same effect and purpose as a child might do the same to a flock of pigeons: entertainment. On the other hand, his immediate superiors never really noticed a thing. She had no idea just how much he lied when he talked to them, or even if he said a lie at all; all she knew was that he was always sickeningly over-the-top when there were immediate rewards to be gained.

The ugly brute and sweet child routine reminded her of childhood, and not at all of the happier memories.

There had even been a time – this she did not see for herself – where Kodama had nearly been mugged. If the rumours were right, two men in masks approached him on a populated road in broad daylight and brandished knives, demanding money or valuables. Kodama's immediate reaction was to shield himself behind a nearby family consisting of a single mother and two young girls, and then beg to take them in his stead.

The men had walked away. Apparently, even _they_ had standards.

It was so _easy_ to compare herself to him – and then see just how much she could truly lose. It was so easy to see just how far she'd have to fall, and fall, and fall, before she ever got to his level. Sometimes, the very fact astonished her.

At other times, it just made her feel better.

* * *

She was just one of the millions of young adults everywhere using social networking. What made her special was that her friends' list was surprisingly desolate.

She wasn't sure exactly when it happened, or when she noticed. All she realized was that one day, she opened up an application only to see that her entire network centered around precisely two friends, one male and one female. As those "friends" happened to be her parents, they didn't exactly count.

For a few moments, she felt pretty glum. Really, this was as low as it can get. The only thing worse than a social life disintegrated to the point where the only supporters available were the ones obligated to be, was a person so repulsive not even his own mother wanted to friend him. Unfortunately, that just wasn't realistic.

…Oh wait a minute.

She checked, just to be sure. Ichirou Kodama.

Well, what do you know. Zero friends. Suppressing a snort and a smirk, she moved to terminate the program.

The mouse was halfway there before she realized the trap.

What the heck was she doing? Degraded to a social outcast – and she was _smiling_? Shouldn't she have viewed this objectively – from the viewpoint of the society she _wanted_ to be in?

Wasn't it time she stopped comparing to the bully no longer, the idiot beneath her, Ichirou Kodama?

Almost frantically, she re-invited everyone from her old circles, trying to remember the words they had shared before, the stuff they used to like. As she watched the virtual mail fall into the virtual mailboxes on her screen, she waited and hoped, _hoped_ that no one had moved on beyond her ability to catch up.

She waited for a pretty long time.

* * *

Chugging down the alcohol had never felt so bittersweet. It was made worse by Kodama's presence.

"They froze the teachers' wages!" he spat, slamming down his seventh – or eighth, or maybe ninth – cup of beer in outrage and drunk enough not to notice the mess that splashed out. "Just when I was promoted to a real teacher! Do they expect me to mark the stupid tests of stupid kids on a student teacher's salary?"

"You think that's bad?" she murmured, surprisingly subdued today. She sipped at her own cup. "I switched my major. Last one wasn't doing any good, but now – now, I'm locked out of my required courses. Stupid, stupid…" She took another sip. "I haven't taken all the prerequisites. And those are at the bottom of the chain. I'm going into my third year taking first-year courses again. I…I won't be graduating for two more years, at the least."

Kodama wasn't listening. "Had to yell at another stupid girl today." Here he switched to broken English. "One flied east, and one flied west, and one flied on top of cuckoo nest." Then Japanese. "Told her that. _Told_ that stupid girl, and then she had the cheek to say that's hard? Learn stupid grammar! When I was her age, I could ace tests in both Japanese and English! Job ain't worth it, I say. Ain't worth it."

"At least you have job. I got downright laid off." Saying that out loud hurt her more than she realized. "I had a position. Convenience store cashier. It took two _years _to get. Then I lost it after all of two months. Just because I was the most expendable. And no one else bothered to call me back for an interview. I know we're in a recession, damn it, but what's so complicated about paying people so that they can _work_?"

"And on top of _that_," Kodama ranted, "they had the nerve to lug a student teacher on me. _Me_! As if I hadn't already granted them so many favours! And that female dog's such a rotten one. She tried to be _sarcastic_ to me! Bah!" Kodama downed the rest of his drink. "Women," he spat, his head drooping. "Sticking their big noses where they don't belong. Only thing worse are children."

She sighed, one final time. "And with all the bad grades I got…My student loan's cut. My credit rating's screwed badly. Don't have enough for next month's rent. Bank's balance is in the double digits. All I need is to be hit by a bus. Then I'm legally bankrupt." Her muttering grew quieter. "Must be the youngest to do so. Maybe there's prize money in that."

Kodama didn't respond. He was snoring, head on the table.

She felt like doing the same. When did life get this complicated? When had she ever needed to be aggressive in surviving? When did simply being better than the disgusting man before her not cut it anymore – and when had their situation suddenly reversed again?

Just what had she been doing with her life?

* * *

The final blow came when her parents, following the example of Kodama's parents and citing a need to learn independence, cut her funding. In Kodama's case, it had been a heavy inconvenience, as now he needed to start budgeting his wages to make sure he could last through the months.

For her however, it was a downright devastating blow. She had lost her job, so the fact that she did not have monetary support drove her into desperation. In a case of bad timing, her money had actually run out while waiting for her parents' check. The result was that she was forced to try a local welfare office.

On her first appointment, she had been shown the door.

"I'm sorry," the worker had said, "but we are already underfunded and you don't meet many requirements. You're not even disabled, or pregnant. I'm sorry."

Somehow or the other, while she stared listlessly up to the cold, grey sky, the idea of a child sounded far better than it should have.

* * *

As soon as she asked, she knew she made a mistake.

To be fair, she was even more drunk than usual this outing. Still, that didn't excuse the fact she had blurted out, in a moment that burned her for the rest of her short life, exactly four words to Kodama the stupid, Kodama the self-centered, Kodama the lowest human in the world:

"Wanna have a kid?"

He had burst out laughing. "You're disgusting!" he slurred. "Dirty slimeballs, kids. Dunno why they don't die already. Good for nothing. Never shut up when I want to. Bet she was behind it all. Disgusting cod's always been a pain in the rear. Just like the rest of them. Hate her, the stupid girl." He took another swig of _sake_ and added, "Stupid kid."

And that was how, hours after the bar had closed, she found herself over a sink with her left arm stretched out, her left hand clenched.

In her right was a knife.

She could do it. It should be okay, in theory. She learned this stuff in high school biology. She knew where everything was. The muscles, the major veins and arteries, the bones, the important nerves. She could do it. If she couldn't get welfare via a child, she could do so with injury. She knew where to cut. She knew what would look bad. She knew how to avoid really crippling herself. She could do it.

It should be okay.

In theory.

* * *

Several months after the police had ruled the death as suicide, the victim's parents put her personal effects up for sale at their house.

Kodama was there. No one knew what he doing. For some time, he had hung around her various academic certificates, and then her chemistry sets and science textbooks, before moving on. He browsed a photo album with little interest until his eyes moved onto one particular pocket – or, more accurately, the item inside: an old, frayed, blue ribbon with the number three sticker attached to it.

"Ooh, what a pretty prize!" was the only thing he said before he pocketed it and left.

When her soul made it to Hell's purification chambers, the demons at work were quite relieved to find that, at the very least, the Loose Soul that had tormented her for years had not manifested before the host died. They did, however, moan over the amount of overtime that would need to be logged to completely rid this soul of its unusually heavy darkness.

As for Kodama, he would meet his match a few years later, in the form of a student by the name of Keima Katsuragi. God only knows, however, that this was not nearly enough divine retribution for the cruelty his heart held.

* * *

**end.**


End file.
